With a ten-day vacation ahead of me, I braced myself for a full day of babysitting Andy (he got dressed up in his Batman costume and acted out all of "The Dark Knight" for me) and then celebrated with an eight day visit from Clare. She's here now and is making me blog, knowing that she looks forward to Sunday updates and wouldn't want others to miss out on what we saw this week.
This was not the first time that I've played tour guide to this city, nor was it the first time that I was greeted by a visitor who could not stop saying, "I'm in Paris. I'm in Paris. I'm in Paris." Paris has this romanticized image that is perpetuated by every movie/book/tv show ever, and rightfully so. It is a beautiful city, a city to walk and to fall in love with, and I was prepared to show it off. This was not my first time up the Eiffel Tower, nor the first time up to Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur, nor was it my first time persuading my visitor to try chocolat chaud from "Cacao et Chocolat" or dragging them onto a boat ride to see all of the major monuments along the Seine. This was not my first time negotiating in French with waiters and translating the suggestions of shopkeepers to save my visitor from having to make the "I'm sorry, I don't understand" face. (It's a quickly muttered, "I'm sorry" followed by an immediate, "Dammit. I spoke in English" finished off with a few rapid blinks and a slight shoulder shrug.)
But for me, this was the first visitor that I've had since I moved to France for the second time and what I noticed most was the change of routine. That is to say, I realized that I've been building a routine (go teach, go pick up Andy, watch Gremlins with Andy, eat dinner, go to bed, repeat) and that I hadn't noticed how settled my life here was becoming. Clare and I have had this great mixture of seeing monuments and catching up with each other, waiting in line at the Eiffel Tower but also escaping to cafes on side streets, sipping espresso in tiny cups and laughing about the bizarre European outfits/haircuts/the fact that rollerblading is still fashionable here. Something about the fact that I already got to show my life to someone means to me that I'm somewhat proud of the life that I am living here, I'm more at ease now than I was in the first couple of weeks...that somewhere within me I believe I have a life here that is worth sharing with the people I love.
Perhaps this is backwards of me to say but what shocked me most this week was the realization that I feel more like an adult here not when I am getting up and going to work but when I am given free time and can do what I please. Going to work, writing lesson plans, picking up Andy and making him wash his hands before his snack, these are the things that I am supposed to think make me an adult. I have a job, I have an income (maybe?) and I have a daily commute. But my daily commute does not make me feel like an adult.
This makes me feel like an adult:
That on a rainy Sunday, when the sky is heavy with water and the whole city seems to be mourning the looming departure of a flight to the US, that it really is okay to spend some downtime relaxing in bed, until grumbling stomachs call for a Sunday brunch, and that no adult is standing outside the bedroom door, telling me to stop being lazy. That the right to be sad, the right to relax, and the right to pick myself up again with an overpriced cup of coffee is something that I get to grant to myself now.
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